Paul Roquet
@inqualia.bsky.social
other spatial mediations | proquet.mit.edu
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Paul Roquet
@inqualia.bsky.social
· Jul 10
Cultural Politics of the Computational Image: CFP – Global Mediations Lab
globalmediations.mit.edu
Building on the great papers from our Global Mediations workshop this past April, we're launching a CFP for additional contributions to an anthology on the global contestation of computational imaging. Details below; proposals due 9/13
“In the rare cases when the bot makes a mistake, they strap on a VR headset and use joysticks to manually control grasp and place the drink back on the shelf […] In a typical eight-hour shift, they take over the robot about 50 times, and it takes up to five minutes each time to resolve the error.”
Japanese convenience stores are hiring robots run by workers in the Philippines
Filipino tele-operators remotely control Japan’s convenience store robots and train AI, benefiting from an uptick in automation-related jobs.
restofworld.org
October 21, 2025 at 1:22 AM
“In the rare cases when the bot makes a mistake, they strap on a VR headset and use joysticks to manually control grasp and place the drink back on the shelf […] In a typical eight-hour shift, they take over the robot about 50 times, and it takes up to five minutes each time to resolve the error.”
Reposted by Paul Roquet
NEW — I dug into the story of ICE abducting a 13-year-old boy in Massachusetts and moving him 500 miles across state lines without notifying his mother, local cop's complicity, and how the federal government's justification for such cruelty is already falling apart:
ICE took a 13-year-old they said had a gun. Local cops say he didn’t.
Now he's detained 500 miles away from his Massachusetts home.
www.thehandbasket.co
October 15, 2025 at 1:44 PM
NEW — I dug into the story of ICE abducting a 13-year-old boy in Massachusetts and moving him 500 miles across state lines without notifying his mother, local cop's complicity, and how the federal government's justification for such cruelty is already falling apart:
Reposted by Paul Roquet
Imagine studying a technology whose presence in the classroom is so detrimental to the development of writing and research skills (including even the will to know the sources behind claims!) that mitigating its effects becomes a central goal of course design, and concluding with tips on adopting it.
October 9, 2025 at 11:53 AM
Imagine studying a technology whose presence in the classroom is so detrimental to the development of writing and research skills (including even the will to know the sources behind claims!) that mitigating its effects becomes a central goal of course design, and concluding with tips on adopting it.
Reposted by Paul Roquet
Just to be blunt, if you want Wired and 404 and The Verge to employ reporters who understand the memes on bullet casings and can connect them to gaming culture while having the legal and support resources to deal with waves of harassment when we do it… you have to subscribe and pay for the work
the entire media ecosystem is just not built or ready for events like this and far right billionaires like larry ellison buying news orgs will only make this worse
September 12, 2025 at 6:58 PM
Just to be blunt, if you want Wired and 404 and The Verge to employ reporters who understand the memes on bullet casings and can connect them to gaming culture while having the legal and support resources to deal with waves of harassment when we do it… you have to subscribe and pay for the work
Reposted by Paul Roquet
A German teen told Meta's child safety researchers his under-10 little brother had been sexually propositioned multiple times on its VR platform.
Meta deleted the evidence.
New internal whistleblower docs indicate that was part of a broader cover-up: www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...
Meta deleted the evidence.
New internal whistleblower docs indicate that was part of a broader cover-up: www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...
Meta suppressed research on child safety, employees say
The company’s lawyers intervened to shape research that might have shed light on risks in virtual reality, four current and former staffers have told Congress. Meta denies the allegations.
www.washingtonpost.com
September 8, 2025 at 12:11 PM
A German teen told Meta's child safety researchers his under-10 little brother had been sexually propositioned multiple times on its VR platform.
Meta deleted the evidence.
New internal whistleblower docs indicate that was part of a broader cover-up: www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...
Meta deleted the evidence.
New internal whistleblower docs indicate that was part of a broader cover-up: www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...
Reposted by Paul Roquet
Shocked, shocked, I tell you
Aaaaand the main business case for consumer LLMs is revealed. It's for gathering data on users, creating profiles, and targeting us with ads and propaganda. Hooray -- it's Web 2.0 with chatbots!
feels significant that mass-market LLMs like ChatGPT are now capable of generating extensive natural-language dossiers about a given user's interests, location, preferences, identifying information, and more
simonwillison.net/2025/May/21/...
simonwillison.net/2025/May/21/...
September 4, 2025 at 8:42 PM
Shocked, shocked, I tell you
2 weeks left on this (no idea why I put the deadline on a weekend)
Building on the great papers from our Global Mediations workshop this past April, we're launching a CFP for additional contributions to an anthology on the global contestation of computational imaging. Details below; proposals due 9/13
Cultural Politics of the Computational Image: CFP – Global Mediations Lab
globalmediations.mit.edu
August 30, 2025 at 9:40 PM
2 weeks left on this (no idea why I put the deadline on a weekend)
Someone at Kodansha keeps inviting art animators to make VR films and it's great (newest one is a Wada Atsushi critique of mental health care in Japan/defense of imaginary cats)
Venice Immersive 2025 - If You See A Cat
YouTube video by BiennaleChannel
youtu.be
August 27, 2025 at 10:56 PM
Someone at Kodansha keeps inviting art animators to make VR films and it's great (newest one is a Wada Atsushi critique of mental health care in Japan/defense of imaginary cats)
Tokyo Metro doing an escape room tie-in for Exit 8 is a little on the nose, but why not I guess
August 11, 2025 at 4:10 AM
Tokyo Metro doing an escape room tie-in for Exit 8 is a little on the nose, but why not I guess
The real 2.5D
MIT tool visualizes and edits “physically impossible” objects
The “Meschers” tool from MIT CSAIL represents “physically impossible” objects commonly found in M.C. Escher’s illustrations by converting both images and 3D models in 2.5-dimensional objects. The tool...
news.mit.edu
August 6, 2025 at 4:43 AM
The real 2.5D
A movie made of dust and mold (complimentary)
July 23, 2025 at 8:51 AM
A movie made of dust and mold (complimentary)
I wonder if one legacy of the VR/metaverse etc. hype cycle is companies have given up hoping people will *voluntarily* adopt new tech
(excerpt from @bcmerchant.bsky.social newsletter)
(excerpt from @bcmerchant.bsky.social newsletter)
July 23, 2025 at 7:05 AM
I wonder if one legacy of the VR/metaverse etc. hype cycle is companies have given up hoping people will *voluntarily* adopt new tech
(excerpt from @bcmerchant.bsky.social newsletter)
(excerpt from @bcmerchant.bsky.social newsletter)
Reposted by Paul Roquet
All I can think about is all the AI startups working as we speak to essentially ruin Reddit on behalf of the advertising industry x.com/SavannahFede...
July 22, 2025 at 7:43 PM
All I can think about is all the AI startups working as we speak to essentially ruin Reddit on behalf of the advertising industry x.com/SavannahFede...
Reposted by Paul Roquet
Cindi Textor's wonderful _Intersectional Incoherence: Zainichi Literature and the Ethics of Illegibility_ is available for free download. With chapters on Yi Kwangsu, Kim Saryang, Kim Sokpong, Yi Yangji, Yu Miri and others.
Intersectional Incoherence | University of California Press
Intersectional Incoherence stages an encounter between the critical discourse on intersectionality
and texts produced by Korean subjects of the Japanese empire and their postwar descendants in Japan,...
luminosoa.org
July 12, 2025 at 9:07 PM
Cindi Textor's wonderful _Intersectional Incoherence: Zainichi Literature and the Ethics of Illegibility_ is available for free download. With chapters on Yi Kwangsu, Kim Saryang, Kim Sokpong, Yi Yangji, Yu Miri and others.
Reposted by Paul Roquet
I spoke to CNN about Japan's new Office for the Promotion of a Society of Harmonious Coexistence with Foreign Nationals and also the rise of Sanseito: "Why has Japan set up a task force to deal with foreigners?"
edition.cnn.com/2025/07/17/a...
edition.cnn.com/2025/07/17/a...
Why has Japan set up a task force to deal with foreigners? | CNN
Japan has worked hard to attract foreigners to boost its sluggish economy but now the perception there are too many has prompted the creation of a new task force, as competition for votes heats up ahe...
edition.cnn.com
July 18, 2025 at 3:30 AM
I spoke to CNN about Japan's new Office for the Promotion of a Society of Harmonious Coexistence with Foreign Nationals and also the rise of Sanseito: "Why has Japan set up a task force to deal with foreigners?"
edition.cnn.com/2025/07/17/a...
edition.cnn.com/2025/07/17/a...
Reposted by Paul Roquet
Building on the great papers from our Global Mediations workshop this past April, we're launching a CFP for additional contributions to an anthology on the global contestation of computational imaging. Details below; proposals due 9/13
Cultural Politics of the Computational Image: CFP – Global Mediations Lab
globalmediations.mit.edu
July 10, 2025 at 2:41 AM
Building on the great papers from our Global Mediations workshop this past April, we're launching a CFP for additional contributions to an anthology on the global contestation of computational imaging. Details below; proposals due 9/13
Building on the great papers from our Global Mediations workshop this past April, we're launching a CFP for additional contributions to an anthology on the global contestation of computational imaging. Details below; proposals due 9/13
Cultural Politics of the Computational Image: CFP – Global Mediations Lab
globalmediations.mit.edu
July 10, 2025 at 2:41 AM
Building on the great papers from our Global Mediations workshop this past April, we're launching a CFP for additional contributions to an anthology on the global contestation of computational imaging. Details below; proposals due 9/13
Reposted by Paul Roquet
An open letter of resignation from myself and many other book series editors at Amsterdam University Press, following its recent acquisition by the notoriously exploitative academic publishing conglomerate Taylor & Francis.
The time has come to reinvent academic publishing. Over the last years conglomerates have bought up once respectable publishers and turned them into rent extraction machines, generating obscene profits from tax-payer funded research and unremunerated academic labor./
mediastudies.hypotheses.org/6850
mediastudies.hypotheses.org/6850
Sale of the Amsterdam University Press (AUP) film, media and communication list to Taylor & Francis – Resignation of series editors and editorial board members
It is with great dismay that we, the undersigned, learned that the film, media and communication list of Amsterdam University Press (AUP) has been taken over by Taylor & Francis, a subsidiary of Infor...
mediastudies.hypotheses.org
July 9, 2025 at 12:06 PM
An open letter of resignation from myself and many other book series editors at Amsterdam University Press, following its recent acquisition by the notoriously exploitative academic publishing conglomerate Taylor & Francis.
My sense is GPS *does* have something to do with AI, but in the sense of training people to do what a computer tells them to do rather than trust what they see in front of them. Technologies against situational awareness
July 9, 2025 at 12:36 PM
My sense is GPS *does* have something to do with AI, but in the sense of training people to do what a computer tells them to do rather than trust what they see in front of them. Technologies against situational awareness
Reposted by Paul Roquet
This is a laundry list of rhetorical strategies to defend the adoption of a given technology for the purposes of advancing an ideology & economic regime: inevitability, unquestioning praise of “innovation,” buy-in from concerned stakeholders, assurances that partnership is not capitulation. 1/n
Today we launched the National Academy for AI Instruction with UFT, Microsoft, OpenAI & Anthropic to offer free, high-quality AI training to educators. Some of you have expressed legitimate reservations about AI and tech companies. I want to speak to you directly. 🧵
July 9, 2025 at 10:57 AM
This is a laundry list of rhetorical strategies to defend the adoption of a given technology for the purposes of advancing an ideology & economic regime: inevitability, unquestioning praise of “innovation,” buy-in from concerned stakeholders, assurances that partnership is not capitulation. 1/n
Finished @lizpelly.bsky.social’s fantastic MOOD MACHINE. The part on the re-muzakification of ambient really tracks with frustrations I’ve heard from musicians lately. If you only go online, it’s as if the history of ambient music has been rewritten to foreground more background-friendly styles
July 9, 2025 at 6:43 AM
Finished @lizpelly.bsky.social’s fantastic MOOD MACHINE. The part on the re-muzakification of ambient really tracks with frustrations I’ve heard from musicians lately. If you only go online, it’s as if the history of ambient music has been rewritten to foreground more background-friendly styles
Will be circling the incomprehensible rotaries with newfound respect now that I know they can keep out self-driving cars
July 2, 2025 at 1:22 PM
Will be circling the incomprehensible rotaries with newfound respect now that I know they can keep out self-driving cars
Posted about this before but this is basically Miyake Kaho’s argument about why working people stop reading novels—if you’re trained to skim for action items/takeaways then all that other novely stuff just becomes inefficient noise
I assume that by now almost no one is reading books anymore. They are watching videos or listening to podcasts or--as in the OP--reading summaries of the same. They idea is to ingest only as much as is useful to the hustle, which sometimes includes pretending to be cultured at retreats, etc.
July 1, 2025 at 7:54 AM
Posted about this before but this is basically Miyake Kaho’s argument about why working people stop reading novels—if you’re trained to skim for action items/takeaways then all that other novely stuff just becomes inefficient noise
Reposted by Paul Roquet
We also looked at institutions & nations that are producing the most surveillance.
Top inst:
1.MSFT
2.CMU
3.MIT
4.Chinese Univ of Hong Kong
Top nations:
1.USA
2.China
3.UK
If an institution, nation or subfield authors papers with downstream patents, most are used in surveillance patents.
6/
Top inst:
1.MSFT
2.CMU
3.MIT
4.Chinese Univ of Hong Kong
Top nations:
1.USA
2.China
3.UK
If an institution, nation or subfield authors papers with downstream patents, most are used in surveillance patents.
6/
June 25, 2025 at 5:54 PM
We also looked at institutions & nations that are producing the most surveillance.
Top inst:
1.MSFT
2.CMU
3.MIT
4.Chinese Univ of Hong Kong
Top nations:
1.USA
2.China
3.UK
If an institution, nation or subfield authors papers with downstream patents, most are used in surveillance patents.
6/
Top inst:
1.MSFT
2.CMU
3.MIT
4.Chinese Univ of Hong Kong
Top nations:
1.USA
2.China
3.UK
If an institution, nation or subfield authors papers with downstream patents, most are used in surveillance patents.
6/
Reposted by Paul Roquet
The output of computer-vision research is overwhelmingly aimed towards monitoring humans
https://go.nature.com/45HQI4f
https://go.nature.com/45HQI4f
Don’t sleepwalk from computer-vision research into surveillance
The output of computer-vision research is overwhelmingly aimed towards monitoring humans. The potential ethical implications need more scrutiny.
go.nature.com
June 26, 2025 at 9:33 AM
The output of computer-vision research is overwhelmingly aimed towards monitoring humans
https://go.nature.com/45HQI4f
https://go.nature.com/45HQI4f